My yoga experience was for extreme grief management and perhaps for suicide prevention over the first several months of practice. Crisis in my life - that has yet to reach it's resolution, has pervaded all waking thought.
The only time I could break free of the survival emotions and emergency brain-wave state of the fight or flight reflex on steroids, was following an hour of hot yoga.
The combination of following a guided series of difficult and awkward poses, in a room of up to 50 other students, before a wall of full-length mirrors - while intentionally focusing on coordinating the breath with the flow of poses... shifts the brain wave patterns.
The conscious attention on sensing the body shifts the brain from thinking and analyzing from within the fight or flight reflex, and can bring our brain to a lower beta or upper alpha frequency.
Combining Meditation With Yoga
The physical yoga uses the body to calm the mind. From this state, learning and change can take place.
If you support the premise that our thinking can have some effect on our destiny, if you have seen evidence of the law of attraction working in your life and for others - then observing your thinking, and intentionally thinking, should be an active goal.
Evidence that thinking can change the neural structure of the brain now abounds. New physical skills can be developed by thought alone. Neuro-linguistic-programming is based on assumptions that the words and images that you think will literally program inevitable outcomes, and that we can model successful roll models and anticipate parallel results.
With Practice
After completing 374 yoga classes in 315 days, my body has changed. I'm stronger. More flexible. I have better balance - and I'm happier.
After 500+ sessions of meditations to practice specific mental movies - they too are becoming strengthened.
It is better to imagine the best outcome of the worst situation. It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.